The importance of cleanliness has long been recognized, particularly in the fields of heath-care, food preparation, and laboratories, to name but a few. Although traditional hand washing using soap and water is performed by most people, these same people are often unwittingly exposed to unsanitary conditions after washing their hands. For example, people are potentially exposed to unsanitary surfaces by touching a handrail of a stairway or escalator, and/or when opening doors, handling currency, touching keyboards, etc. Thus, sanitizer dispensers are used in a wide variety of settings to provide people with a sanitizing material to rub on their hands prior to undertaking activities where cleanliness is important, such as prior to eating, handling food, or attending to a patient at a health care facility. Of course, sanitizer dispensers are also used at remote locations, such as at construction sites, temporary emergency care locations or large public gatherings where soap and water are not always readily available.
One difficulty with attempting to provide sanitary conditions is that people do not always wash their hands and/or use a sanitizer material when they should. For example, health care staff and/or patient visitors do not always have clean hands when visiting or attending to a patient. As a further example, people in the food service industry do not always have clean hands when undertaking their food preparation duties. Even when sanitizer dispensers are available, the intended user, such as health care staff or food preparation workers, do not necessarily use the sanitizer dispensers when they should. Thus, for those situations or settings where users are required by a rule or requirement to use a sanitizer, it would be advantageous in such situations to provide a verification system to monitor user compliance.
A further difficulty with attempting to provide sanitary conditions is that an improper substance may be loaded into a sanitizer dispenser. Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a system of monitoring whether an authorized sanitizer container has been installed in a sanitizer dispenser.